Et In Arcædia Ego
by tranimation
Summary: The Repo Man known as "The Plague Doctor" carries out a year-long plot of revenge to take down the Largos, destroy GeneCo, retrieve his wife, cure their son, or die trying. Crossover (REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA/HUMAN TARGET): Horror/Romance/Tragedy: On-going. Rated T for now, M later.
1. Plaga Medicus

**REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA/HUMAN TARGET: ET IN ARCÆDIA EGO**  
**Chapter I: "Plaga Medicus"**

Written by Abri Isgrig (Lady Jekyll) and Diane N. Tran (tranimation)

* * *

To our surprise, my friend Abri Isgrig (Lady Jekyll) and I have gotten a lot of response over this particular crossover, where we used the world of _REPO!_ and added characters from _Human Target_, on DeviantArt. It was one of those ideas that haunted and hounded us until we wrote it down. We hope to bring you a good, strong story with deep symbolism and emotional melodrama worthy of the opera house — and horror with violence, gore, and sex worthy of the Grand Guignol! This story takes place about a year after the events of the _REPO!_ film.

The title "Et in Arcædia ego" is Latin for "Even in Arcadia (Paradise), I (Death) exist," as spoken by Death personified: However, there's a cruel irony within its meaning that is not obvious to most whom are familiar with the quote: While it is _grammatically_ accurate in Latin, it is not a proper sentence, but a nominal phrase with no finite verb and no comma: The most _literal_ translation goes "And in Paradise I," not "me" but "I." Some historians conclude this is an anagram that, when Death personified spoke the phrase, Death was referring to himself as Paradise and thus Paradise is the personification of Death, too.

The chapter title "Plaga Medicus" is Latin for "Plague Doctor." Historically, plague doctors were specialized physicians, hired by the Church, that "treated" bubonic plague victims during the Black Death in medieval Europe, to which they adopted an ominous-looking costume, consisting of a heavy, leather robes to draw the plague away from the patient and onto the garment, a pair of red-glass eyepieces to make them impervious to evil, and a mask with a hollow beak filled with herbs and spices to overpower the _miasma _("bad air") thought to carry the plague. However, while his duties were often limited to visiting victims to verify whether they had been afflicted or not, by prodding the body with a stick, plague doctors were more responsible for spreading the disease, as a vector for infected fleas and assisting in poor sanitation, rather than its treatment.

**Synopsis**: The Repo Man known as "The Plague Doctor" carries out a year-long plot of revenge to take down the Largos, destroy GeneCo, retrieve his wife, cure their son, or die trying. Crossover: Horror/Romance/Tragedy: On-going. Rated T for now, M later due to intense violence, gore, sexuality, and drug use.

_REPO! the Genetic Opera_ © Darren Smith/Terrance Zdunich  
_Human Target_ © DC Comics/Fox

* * *

Dr. Juan Guerrero read that headline splashed across the front page of a discarded copy of the magazine, _Vanity and Vein_:

WHO IS THE PLAGUE DOCTOR?

The infamous Repo Man — an urban legend, a figment of the mind's eye, a ghoul, a boogeyman — was sketched upon the cover, with a pair of hollow, soulless eyes and a long, vulturine beak and a dramatic, flowing cape. It was amusing really, as it looked nothing like him. Artists are a strange and imaginative lot, but not very smart.

Guerrero tossed the magazine into the gutter, studying it roll along with the other trash the wind carried. He turned on his holographic watch:

It was time. Would she come?

Turning the corner, a woman, fresh and beautiful, pranced down the half-lit alleyway with a man at her arm, gleefully laughing at the world as she did so. Who she was and why she was here was unimportant. She skipped a payment to GeneCo on her heart and, by contract, had to pay the price of said penalty. He watched her escort — her client, no doubt — press her against the building wall in a lustful promise, and Guerrero made his move.

He stepped out of the depths of the shadows, under the guise of the Repo Man, and cracked a heavy walking-stick across the spine of the man and he knocked him to the ground. He unsheathed a ready blade from his staff and slit the woman's throat, as her body slumped over her companion. The man scrabbled to his feet at the sight of the Corpse and turned to find himself affront a harbinger of Judgment:

The Plague Doctor.

He trembled before the creature, as it pressed a solitary finger under its beak and whispered:

"Shhhhhhh..."

The Plague Doctor permitted the man to flee. His time of Judgment will come eventually, as he knelt down before his target and got to work. He ignored what little fabric clothed her, slicing through the warm flesh. He snapped the sternum clean and pulled the ribcage ajar. His talons circled around the once-beating muscle and extracted it out, bagging it in a refrigerated case for delivery.

He craned his head up at when he heard the faint sound of applause next to him and, there, sitting cross-legged on the closed lid of a dumpster was the GeneCop-turned-Graverobber, Christopher Chance.

"Nice work, buddy, very nice," marvelled the white-haired Graverobber with a smirk. "No wonder you're the best Repo Man of the Four. You take organ repossession and turn it into an art form."

"What part of 'stop following me' don't you understand?" sneered the Plague Doctor in an icy voice that seemed unlike him.

"Whoa, look who woke up on the wrong side of the dissection bed." Chance jumped from his seat, biting into a withered apple and tossing it aside, and sauntered over to admire the Corpse at the assassin's feet. "You done with her?"

"I got what I needed. And if I find you tailing me again," he tapped the bloody blade of his scalpel against the right glass eyepiece of his mask and continued, "you lose an eye."

"Hey, what's with you? You're not acting like yourself." The Graverobber frowned and glanced up and down his friend's costume: "Well, so to speak."

"Get your shit and go."

As the Repo Man tapped a button on his holographic watch to signal the clean-up crew, the Graverobber pulled an empty syringe out of his satchel from his belt. He plunged the needle deep through the nasal cavity of the fallen woman, punching though the tough cartilage and sensitive bone, and anchored its tip into the epiphysis. He pulled the piston out, sucking in the glowing, glandular ooze into the glass vial. Chance pulled the needle to value at his prize, adoring its splendour in its freshest and purest form, with a simper:

Zydrate.

The Graverobber turned to meet his comrade-in-arms, but he was abandoned with only the Dead for company.

The Plague Doctor had gone.

* * *

URL: favdotme/d2mugcj


	2. Ecce Arcædia

**REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA/HUMAN TARGET: ET IN ARCÆDIA EGO**  
**Chapter II: "Ecce Arcædia"**

Written by Abri Isgrig (Lady Jekyll) and Diane N. Tran (tranimation)

* * *

For those who thought we forgotten this story, we have not. While we have a basic outline of how the story and its characters we going to play, turning that "outline" into a "story" is a difficult thing to accomplish; therefore, we apologize that a major writer's block accosted this story to the point that it took _this_ long for the second chapter to be completed. Muses are fickle, fickle creatures!

We always wanted to incorporate analogies and metaphors into this story to give it more "depth" and "weight." Because of the long hiatus between the two chapters, we ended up ingraining them into every facet imaginable through the use of wordplay (through the beauty of the written word can only give us), personifications (by capitalizing key words to anthropomorphizing them as "players" as much the characters themselves are "players"), religious allegories (with emphasis on apocalypticism), and (hopefully) they will interconnect and intertwine neatly in the end. Is it too much? Too high brow? You be the judge: See if you can catch all everything. Let's make a game out of it, shall we?

"Ecce Arcædia" is Latin for "Behold Paradise," but has more connotations to it, for it can also be translated as "Look Paradise," or "Here (is) Paradise," but can be used elliptically as "Paradise can be seen here," or "Paradise _is_ (right) here." The word "Arcædia" refers to a vision of pastoralism and equilibrium with nature, an idyllic vision of unspoiled wilderness with bountiful natural splendour, harmony, simplicity, and inhabited by plain, virtuous folk, like farmers, shepherds, and other "noble savages" whom exist close to nature, living off the land, and uncorrupted by civilization. Arcædia differs from the concept of Utopia, because Utopia is _unattainable_, while Arcædia is a lost, Edenic form of life, a form of nostalgia. The cruel irony is that the world of _REPO!_, the "stage" of the story, can be seen two ways: as a _restoration_ to the ideal (a paradise renewed), or as a _obliteration_ of the ideal (a paradise lost) caused by the profound effects of war, disease, death, technology, and politics, or _perhaps_...something in the middle?

* * *

Necropolis.

City of the Dead.

Never has there been a place so aptly named.

There was an idea of the City once — a glittering, beautiful, shining thing with hopes and dreams — but it was not meant to be. The Wars had changed that and left its imprint everywhere: The Plague devoured half the population. The oceans rose and swallowed much of the world. Land became a precious commodity. It was a City of Nightmares, of glass and steel that blossomed towards the perpetual darkness aloft and the noxious pollution abound from the Dead, rotting and festering inches below the earth. It was a City of Disease — a virulent, spreading infection, a wasteland of sickness, that squatted upon its putrid foundations, twisting its tentacles into the hearts of all those whom survived it. Corpses were a common sight. Death and Decay were crammed in and out of every imaginable corner of Life: Corpses poisoned the air with its moldering stench, littering in the streets and alleyways only to be vagrantly stepped over. Corpses contaminated the soil, sprouting out from the earth, like crags, and leaving nothing else to grow in its stead. Corpses polluted the water, scuttling across the undulating tides and bobbing amass across the seas far beyond the murky haze of the horizon. Corpses were stockpiled the graveyards inside, like landfills; and when they were over capacity, as they often were, Corpses were heaped into decrepit buildings towards reaches of the ceilings and stacked atop one another to create bridges. Corpses filled even the sewer-ways known as the Catacombs. No one went down into the Catacombs because that was where the Repo Men reigned.

Twisted and hidden under the City built on top of the Dead was an endless labyrinth of tunnels and crawls where skulls and bones, the first wave of the population to die, were tucked elaborately between the bricks. The Repo Men could use the Catacombs any way they chose. They could suddenly enter the streets, like phantoms, fade in and out of sight, hide betwixt shadows, and then exit the same way with their prize. They sprawled underneath the capital like a circulatory system and, at its centre, was GeneCo, spearheaded by the world's foremost authority on bio-surgical technology:

Rottissimo Largo.

The King of the Necropolis.

The Saviour of Humanity.

Never has there been a man so aptly named.

This self-made man from a troubled peasantry village escaped abject poverty and tyrannical oppression of his fatherland through sheer will and hard work to become one of the most affluent plastic surgeons, fashion trend-setters, and sought-after bachelors of his generation. This bleeding heart of a gentleman philanthropist chose to leave his fame and luxury to humbly serve the Free Nations, with international media close at his heels, as a decorated veteran and combat casualty surgeon along the frontlines. When the New World global administration formed out of the physical and political devastation caused by the Wars, he was rewarded for his selfless efforts to be the first legislative head of the Department of Health and Human Services.

This "miracle company" by the name of GeneCo, this beacon of renewed hope scrawled out in neon lights, endorsed under the flag of the New World Order that bellowed against the sunless skies, was the heartbeat of the City itself — a false heart, like everything else — but pulsing with blood. Blood, rich and intoxicating and, above all, corrupt: It was blood all the same. It was, indeed, fortuitous, perhaps immaterial, that the ascension of this mega-corporation should arise out of the epidemic tragedy when it did. GeneCo, with its blithe generosity and untapped compassion towards humanity, offered their "premium" stockyard of custom-made, designer-quality synthetic organs of those whom could afford it first: And those whom could not met with the Repo Men.

The arrival of the Repo Men into the public consciousness was, indeed, just as coincidental, with the sudden legislative approval of _Prop 32-14_ that authorized legal organ repossession for GeneCo worldwide; and, just as insignificant, that a number of disagreeable politicians and inquisitive media-mongers slipped under the cracks of the first wave of the Dead prior to its approval: Corpses were a common sight, incidentally.

And whilst there were a handful of Repo Men under contract of GeneCo, there were four in particular whom were the most feared, the most formidable, the most legendary, of them all. They were the harbingers of Judgment:

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

But on the Night of Judgment, on the Night of the Genetic Opera fell, on the Night the King of Necropolis, the Saviour of Humanity, fell, on the Night the Voice of GeneCo, the Songtress of a Generation, fell, was the Night that one of the Four fell:

Nathan Wallace.

The Third Horseman.

The Rider of the Black Horse.

Famine Personified.

The Night Surgeon.

And within that emptiness, that open wound left to ooze and pus upon the Night of Judgment, another Corpse fell upon the City of the Dead, louder than the three before her, and chose to waste away, fade out, and evaporate into the shadows, for the True Heir of GeneCo, the Poster Child of Progress, had refused _everything_ that was offered to her:

The Saddle of the Black Horse.

The Throne of Necropolis.

The Crown of GeneCo.

The Order of the New World.

All were left unclaimed.

And in the wake of its chaos, another War, unimaginatively crueller and bloodier, sprang from the Corpses whom were left fallen that Night. The three remaining members of the Largo family — Luigi, Paviche, and Carmela (better known as Amber Sweet) — transformed their sibling rivalry into a mad struggle for absolute power that corrupts absolutely between a Queen and two Bishops. But another did lie in wait upon the chessboard under the guise of a Knight:

A pair of heavy boots trampled through the mire and muck of one of the underground channels of the Catacombs, as he pulled the wide brim of his hat down to prevent the dripping water to fall on his pointed, predacious mask, allowing the blue glow of his eyepieces to penetrate through the black. The dilapidated walls of brick and bone echoed with the wheezing sound of his gas mask and the pitter-patter of the storm above, but even the rains could not clean the corruption and sin of the City of the Dead:

He was John Harrison then.

He is Juan Guerrero now.

Behold the First Horseman.

The Rider of the White Horse.

Pestilence Personified.

The Plague Doctor.

Never has there been a Repo Man so aptly named.

* * *

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